Just to prove my point on AI assisted product development...
As a little weekend project I created https://companychat.uk/ from scratch in net 2 days. That is from idea to a fully functional MVP (not just a demo proof-of-concept), delivering value to the end user. Feel free to give it a go, you get 5 free tokens to play with!
It's an AI aided advanced search tool for the publicly available Companies House dataset. It can help finding leads for all sorts of campaigns and help research by answering questions and prompts such as "How many companies in Brighton were founded by under 30s last year?" or "Give me a list of companies in Bournemouth that will turn 10 years old next month!".
It's hosted on a tiny EC2 instance (£6 per month), connects to an on-premise database server via Tailscale (PostgreSQL with GIS support, hosting Companies House dataset through an ETL pipeline) and to a local SQLite database for system data.
Application stack is FastAPI with Jinja templates for the backend and HTMX + TailwindCSS for frontend rendering.
AI stack: Cursor + Claude Sonnet 3.5 for development, Langchain and Langgraph with gpt-4o-mini for AI assistance.
End to end implemented by a single engineer using Cursor with Claude Sonnet 3.5.
I think how the situation turned out and how you dealt with it, gave you a much more important life experience! Dealing with BS project blockers by clients/execs and finding a way to turn it into something positive is not something they teach at school, well done team!
One idea I keep thinking about (which I'm sure interferes with some sort of copyright law) is:
1. User buys a physical copy of a movie/music
2. Instead of sending the disc to their house, it's sent to a storage facility
3. In the storage facility a digital backup is made and uploaded to a cloud storage
4. User is given access to the backup which they can watch/listen to
5. User would be the owner of said physical copy and when they sell it, all digital backups would be erased.
A key problem with zediva was that they were only offering rentals, not ownership. Ownership of a particular copy gives you rights that you don't have when renting.
One thing to note is this would be very expensive from a bandwidth perspective, of course depending on streaming quality. A 2 hour 4k video is about 40GB of data transfer, I'm presuming if someone buys something over rent they're going to watch it at least 3x... A quick google suggests 120GB can cost $6 to move.
happy to hear if my math is off and learn more about the pricing structures
This is what I'm attempting to revive with Murfie/Crossies.
Right now, I'm dealing with unrelated problems with my warehouse so the service is only partly functional. In my opinion the basic model, with true ownership, should be completely legal under copyright law.
Chargeback is exactly what I'm going for, but need to wait until the payment settles (couple of days) and then I can start the dispute process (called my credit card provider right after I realised UberEats is not willing to refund), which with my credit card provider is the following:
- Hold the phone for 40 minutes
- Explain the situation
- Wait for a paper letter on the post that includes an empty printed form with a return envelope
- Fill out the form with the exact information I provided on the phone
- Post the return envelope
- Wait
Fortunately I don't mind playing along and I'm pretty sure having this deliberately crazy process (instead of an online form) is a much bigger pain for my credit card provider (who are hoping for churn and people abandoning the process) than myself. Well, not me. It's not the £4, it's the principal.
Why should a customer pay for bad app design? The app allowed the code to be applied to that specific restaurant. Then backend refused it and customer pays the difference. In what world is that acceptable?
This is so bad I can’t imagine even Uber Eats really thinks it’s acceptable. Probably a bug.
The problem is that tech support are useless automatons and there is no way to really escalate to those that can see it clearly should be fixed other than shouting on Twitter. Very frustrating when there’s no avenue for real review and redress other than chargebacks.
I recently(ish) discovered a legitimate billing error with Lyft/Bay Wheels that caused a few bucks of overage[1]. It wasn’t a lot of money to me, but I pointed it out to them as it was an obvious error. To their credit, they refunded several entire trips, not just the disparity, and I believe they refunded others’ affected rides as well. I think that’s a satisfactory approach: mistakes happen, but companies should make an effort to ensure that they don’t benefit if they make an accident that favors themselves.
Love the simplicity of the app, used it for years! However when I started working with docker-compose stacks exposing PostgreSQL port I had to uninstall it because it all got confusing.
It's an AI aided advanced search tool for the publicly available Companies House dataset. It can help finding leads for all sorts of campaigns and help research by answering questions and prompts such as "How many companies in Brighton were founded by under 30s last year?" or "Give me a list of companies in Bournemouth that will turn 10 years old next month!".
It's hosted on a tiny EC2 instance (£6 per month), connects to an on-premise database server via Tailscale (PostgreSQL with GIS support, hosting Companies House dataset through an ETL pipeline) and to a local SQLite database for system data.
Application stack is FastAPI with Jinja templates for the backend and HTMX + TailwindCSS for frontend rendering.
AI stack: Cursor + Claude Sonnet 3.5 for development, Langchain and Langgraph with gpt-4o-mini for AI assistance.
End to end implemented by a single engineer using Cursor with Claude Sonnet 3.5.